Welcome to Year Two

Our first week in Year Two has been absolutely super! You have all settled beautifully into the new rhythms and routines, showing great enthusiasm and excitement for the year ahead. We spent our first day getting to know each other and exploring the classroom, even playing games where you had to find certain items to help you learn where everything belongs. You also created a time capsule, which will be returned to you at the end of the year, and designed your own bookmarks ready for your new reading books. Later in the day, you were introduced to our brand-new topic--transport--and your excitement was wonderful to see! We shared the story The Naughty Bus together, and you began creating your very own naughty buses, full of creativity and imagination. It has been such a fantastic start, and I can already tell that you are going to be a very creative and inspiring class this year!

In English this week, you found out that you were going to become story detectives! Scattered across the carpet were lots of intriguing clues that you had to piece together to predict what our new story might be about. Among the clues were animals like elephants, zebras, horses, cows and sheep, as well as a boat, some binoculars, and a little girl. To add to the mystery, you were also shown a picture of a river and listened carefully to the sound of flowing water. From these clues, you came up with some fantastic predictions, including the idea that the story might be about a zookeeper who went to a river to collect fish to feed her animals. The next day, the mystery was revealed--our new story is called The River. We spent time studying the front cover before reading the book together, and you were amazed to discover that the story is all about a girl's exciting adventure on a river, which takes her past waterfalls, farms, jungles, and even all the way to the ocean. We finished the week by looking closely at the different settings in the story and thinking about what we could see in each one.

In Maths this week, we began our brand-new scheme of learning, First4Maths, and focused on numbers to 100. We started by learning how to use a bead string to count in 10s and 1s up to 100. You noticed that the colours on the bead string changed every time you reached a new 10, which really helped you to see the pattern. You worked brilliantly at your tables to find different numbers on your bead strings, carefully counting in 10s to get there--I was so impressed at how quickly you picked this up! We then moved on to exploring a 100 square and discovered how it can help us to find and recognise numbers. You quickly spotted a fantastic trick: all the numbers in the same column have the same amount of 1s, and all the numbers in the same row have the same number of 10s. This discovery helped you to complete missing number tracks with confidence and independence at your tables.

In our afternoon learning you had PE with coach Beth, mindfulness and PHSE with Mrs Chesters on Wednesday. On Thursday, you started your new transport topic in History and learnt all about when different vehicles were invented and we put these on a timeline with some events that we already knew happened from our learning in Year One. On Friday, we started our new learning in RE about the bible and we thought carefully about our special books and why the bible is such a special book to Christians. We even managed to have some time on the adventure playground as a treat for our great behaviour.

I have had such a fantastic start to the term and can't want to spend the rest of this year with you Year Two.

Have a wonderful weekend,

Miss Haynes